EASE Peer Review Committee news and forthcoming events

Today we have two EASE personnel announcements to make. Following the introduction of Duncan Nicholas as President, we are pleased to announce Bahar Mehmani as Vice-Chair of the EASE Peer Review Committee, alongside Flaminio Squazzoni.

Here follows a statement from Bahar, and news of some imminent activities we invite you to participate in.



I am delighted to take on the role of vice-chair of the Peer Review Group and look forward to working with you on this very important topic starting with two updates on upcoming events.

I appreciate it is short notice, but tomorrow (14 July) I wanted to draw your attention to the STM webinar on the draft of a peer review taxonomy.

In the past few months, I have been working with Caroline Black, Elizabeth Moylan, Joris Van Rossum, Maria Kowalczuk, Sabina Alam, Tiago Barros to create a taxonomy of peer review. It all started from a workshop organised by Joris Van Rossum and Andrew Preston organized on transparent peer review and data sharing last year. The conclusion of the workshop was STM journals need to be more transparent and clear about their peer review models in the communications to authors, reviewers, and readers.

We will present our first draft of the taxonomy during at this webinar and we will invite the scholarly publishing community to provide us with their feedback and comments. You can provide your feedback on our first draft by commenting on the document we have posted here.



The webinar starts at 15:00 CEST on Tuesday, 14 July. It is a free event, so please register and spread the word.

I also want to let you know that this year’s Peer Review Week (PRW), an annual event led by academic publishers, societies, and other scholarly organisations, is dedicated to “Trust in Peer Review.” During the week of 21-25 September 2020, participating organisations will highlight the critical role of peer review in research with a week of virtual events and activities.

I am co-chairing the Events and International Outreach organizing committed of the peer review week, so please share this news through your networks. Duncan Nicholas is also representing EASE, managing the PRW YouTube Channel, curating a series of video comments discussing the theme of ‘Trust’.

If you are planning, or are interested in running any related activities within your EASE Chapter or in your professional network, please let us know by sharing the details through this contact form on the PRW website: https://peerreviewweek.wordpress.com/contact/. The peer review week organising committee can then help you with ‘how-to-organise’ guidelines and further dissemination of the news.

I look forward to work closely with you and would love to hear your suggestions. Just drop me an email

Bahar Mehmani

Vice-chair of EASE Peer Review Committee

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